Most millennial moms who skip college also skip marriage

June 16, 2014

Credit: Johns Hopkins University

Waiting until marriage to have babies is now "unusual" among less-educated adults close to 30 years old, Johns Hopkins University researchers found.

"Clearly the role of marriage in fertility and family formation is now modest in early adulthood and the lofty place that marriage once held among the markers of adulthood is in serious question," sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin said. "It is now unusual for non-college graduates who have children in their teens and 20s to have all of them within marriage."

Among parents aged 26 to 31 who didn't graduate from college, 74 percent of the mothers and 70 percent of the fathers had at least one child outside of marriage, Cherlin found. And, 81 percent of births reported by women and 87 percent of births reported by men had occurred to non-college graduates.

"If marriage retains its place anywhere," Cherlin said, "it would be among the college graduates, because most of them do not begin to have children until after they are married. The difference between them and the non-college-educated with regard to the percentage of births within marriage is so striking as to suggest a very different experience of early adulthood."

The study is detailed in "Changing Fertility Regimes and the Transition to Adulthood: Evidence from a Recent Cohort," a paper by Cherlin, Elizabeth Talbert and Suzumi Yasutake that was presented recently to the Population Association of America.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University

The researchers mined data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, focusing on a sample of 9,000 "early adults" who reached ages 26 to 31 in 2011. They are the oldest members of the generation commonly known as millennials.

By that age, 53 percent of the women had given birth to at least one child and 64 percent of the mothers had at least one baby when they weren't married. (Forty-seven percent of the mothers had all of their babies out of wedlock.) The percentage of unwed pregnancies goes up as the mothers' education level declines. The numbers are roughly the same for men.

Of mothers with four or more years of college, 32 percent had at least one baby while unmarried.

Of mothers with only one to three years of college, 67 percent had at least one baby while unmarried.

Lastly, among mothers with no high school diploma, 87 percent had at least one baby while unmarried.

Only 36 percent of the mothers had all of their babies while married—that's 46 percent of whites, 10 percent of blacks and 28 percent of Hispanics. Those numbers are roughly the same for men.

"The literature on early adulthood often suggests that this period can be a valuable time of self-exploration free of adult responsibilities," said Cherlin, the Benjamin H. Griswold Professor of Public Policy at Johns Hopkins. "But this characterization would seem to better apply to well-educated middle-class early adults with their typically long period of college attendance, perhaps followed by graduate school, and their postponement of childbearing until after marriage."

(Phys.org) —An Iowa State University sociologist is not surprised by a recent U.S. Census Bureau report showing a spike in the number of unmarried women giving birth. According to the report, nearly 36 percent of babies ...

For many, an important marker of adulthood is forming a family, whether it's having a child, getting married or cohabiting with a romantic partner. Researchers at Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family ...

(Medical Xpress)—With roughly four in 10 of all U.S. births now to unwed mothers, a new longitudinal study by Cornell demographers is the first to show that being raised in a single-parent home poses significant risks to ...

Fewer women are getting married and they're waiting longer to tie the knot when they do decide to walk down the aisle. That's according to a new Family Profile from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) ...

Recommended for you

The recent suicide of Brandy Vela, a teen in Texas City, Texas, was a potent reminder of the sometimes tragic consequences of bullying. According to Vela's parents, the teen fatally shot herself Nov. 29 following months of ...

(Phys.org)—Douglas Petrovich, an archaeologist with Ontario's Wilfrid-Laurier University in Canada has sparked controversy in the ancient history scholarly community by making claims that he has found proof that Hebrew ...

Since 2008, MIT economist Tavneet Suri has studied the financial and social impacts of Kenyan mobile-money services, which allow users to store and exchange monetary values via mobile phone. Her work has shown that these ...

Researchers have discovered a dinosaur tail complete with its feathers trapped in a piece of amber. The finding reported in Current Biology on December 8 helps to fill in details of the dinosaurs' feather structure and evolution, ...

1 comment

In recent years Latin immigrants have expanded into North American counties, using less birth-control methods than native populations.

This Latin-cultural expansion is characterized by hard-working laborers, often adverse to registration with civil authorities, as required for marriage / drivers licenses, or the application of college / financial aid.

The author's observations may show the expansion of immigrant servatude, without citizenship, due process, or public-policy protections, so they can be paid below minimum wage, and exploited indefinitely.

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.